It Follows Review by Peter Bradshaw “sexual dread fuels a modern horror classic”
A friend confessed to me recently that this was the only film to have given him, in adult life, a proper wake-up-sweating nightmare. I don’t think I have ever had a nightmare quite as scary as this film – a modern classic of fear to be compared to something by a young Carpenter or De Palma.
It Follows is from the American director David Robert Mitchell, whose 2010 debut movie, The Myth of the American Sleepover, was a gentle, unthreatening drama about teens and platonic crushes. That was Dr Jekyll to the snarling Mr Hyde of this new one. It genuinely is disturbing.
What Mitchell has given us is a contemporary reworking of ideas from MR James; in particular, his 1911 ghost story Casting the Runes. Jay (Maika Monroe) is a high-school student who has just started to date a nice enough guy called Hugh (Jake Weary); the rest of the time she hangs out with her sister Kelly (Lili Sepe), Yara (Olivia Luccardi) and a shy childhood friend called Paul (Keir Gilchrist) who has long had a hopeless crush on her. Jay’s normal sex life takes its normal course, but then she finds out, too late, that she has been inducted without her knowledge into a supernatural death cult. The sex act means that she will be followed, at a zombie’s walking-pace, by a demon that only she can see, and which will kill her. The only way she can get rid of her pursuer before this happens is to have consenting sex with someone else, and so pass the curse on to them. Her agonies of horror and indecision are compounded by the presence of Paul, piningly ready to protect the person he loves.